Assessment of palm OS susceptibility to malicious code threats

Abstract

The Palm OS operating system for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones has a weak security architecture, which introduces all sorts of security problems. This paper specifically targets the problem of malicious code. The main contribution of this work is the in-depth analysis of different vulnerabilities in Palm OS and the ways in which they can be exploited by malicious code. Furthermore, the key reasons for this problem are discussed and some suggestions for improvement are formulated. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.